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What’s keeping me from achieving my goals

Elizabeth from Delightfully Tacky wrote a post back in July about goals and dreams and it got the ball rolling in my mind. Even if it did take me almost a month to get my act together to write about it.

What do I really want to do with my life? Ugh. Sometimes I hate being so adult. But really I’m 25 and I feel like I should have a clear idea in my mind about me, and what I like, what drives me, and what I want to be doing. But I don’t really.

When I finished high school I had no idea what I wanted to do. As a teenager I’d gone through a few career wants but nothing really stuck. I saw a career adviser when I was nearing the end and he suggested a course for me to do. This was my first mistake. I was so happy to have someone tell me what I should do that I didn’t think about it any further. I took a year off and worked as a swim teacher, I went to uni for 3 years and only at the end of that time did I start to think ‘oh hey, so now what?’. My course was VERY open ended. The course guide stated at least 15 things that you could do upon completing the course.

Year 12: Mum and I

When I got to the end of my degree (a bachelor of arts, with a media and communications major) I wasn’t excited. I didn’t feel that I had actually achieved anything because I didn’t have a job or a direction. This was the first time that I started thinking about what I was good at. I settled on being organised. I was good at that. I could do something with that. So I started a cert III in event management, which seemed to fit.

Bar class at TAFE for events

Or not. Yes I liked organising, but no I didn’t like phone work or crabby clients. I also got a terrible job in the tourism industry at the end of those 6 months which turned me way off. Noooww whaaaaaat?

My current workplace

So I went back to working with kids. The swim teaching, and another job as a party host had showed me that working with kids was pretty damn fun and something that I was pretty damn good at. But now I’m nearing 2.5 years working as an out of school hours care coordinator and I’m over it. Again. I hate not being paid sick and holiday leave. I hate having to look for other shifts every school holidays. I am annoyed at the lack of organisation within the company.

I hate this.

So I’ve blathered on about work goals, but to me if you’re doing something 25+ hours per week then you better damn love it. There are other goals; some of which have been achieved like buying a house, and some which need to wait; such as becoming a mother.

Our little house

What IS keeping me from achieving my goals? Probably a lot of it is fear of the unknown. Maybe I want to do activities with people living in aged care? Maybe I want to open my own play center? Maybe I want to get into visual merchandising?

And a fear of failure. What if working with the elderly isn’t anything like I think it will be and I’ll have to change jobs again? What if I open a centre and it fails and nobody comes? What if I end up setting up windows for Katies?

I’m guessing a lot of it also is that I don’t really know what I want. Everything has it’s positives and it’s negatives. And the other thing that plays on my mind is that I wish I had have thought more about my strengths and likes before now. I could have saved myself 3.5 years of study. Not to say that I didn’t learn anything from my time in further education, but maybe it would have been better spent doing a visual merchandising course. Or a diploma of children’s services (at an actual university or tafe, rather than awkwardly through).

But even though some of my goals haven’t been met, I need to remind myself that it’s ok to be where I’m at. There are a lot of things in my life that are pretty damn great. And even if I’m not sure what I want to do career wise, at least I have a job. Emma from A Beautiful Mess wrote about changing dreams and it made me feel better, especially when she said “You are not a failure. Even if you’re feeling like one lately, please know I’ve been right there with you. I believe in you. You should believe in yourself”. Thanks Emma.